11 Year Old Suicide After Homophobic Taunts

Whatever happened to love, charity, acceptance, tolerance? I guess they're all the ways of hell or something. Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an 11 year old boy, was found hung by an electrical cord from a beam in his home. Apparently attributed to suicide, the boy had undergone multiple taunts from his classmates at the New Leadership Charter school about being gay. Apparently, they told him on a regular basis, "You're gay, you must be gay, you act like a girl." The boy's mother had repeatedly called and met with school administrators every week for 6 months before the suicide.

On the day of his suicide, he came home and told his mother that he had bumped into a girl who proceeded to shout at him and threaten him, at which point he was suspended for 5 days. School officials are saying they never suspended the boy, but obviously we don't know for sure, and they're the only ones still talking. But they have admitted that he was punished for the talked about incident. I am wondering why he was the one punished?

This is a prime example of what is happening in our schools, what is happening in our society, what kind of crap parents are teaching their kids, and the effect it is having on kids, innocent kids. I mean if we cannot turn to the administrators of our schools to provide a safe haven, what do we do. In this case, he did have the support of his mother, but some kids don't even have that. People who really are gay face a barrage of physical, emotional, and psychological attacks on a regular basis, just as those kids who who are of a different race, family background, religion, etc. And in every case it is horrible. In every case, it is tragic. In every case, there is someone hurting, and it's not right. It's because of what some parents are willfully teaching their children about what is right and what is wrong.

I remember my school days and those of a few people I cared about. We had ice cubes thrown at us when we first started attending a certain high school, because they had never seen an Asian person, let alone a Korean person. A child I knew when he was in elementary school was beat up on a regular basis and then suspended for being beat up, and he was beat up because he was Asian. He was suspended, because the administrator apparently felt the same way. His parents had grown up white, they had never had certain issues, and frankly, they treated him like he was a trouble maker making stories up. We all saw the bruises, the scars, the medical records of the times when he had to go to the hospital because they shot a bone with a beebee gun or something else. Likewise, my parents thought that I was being too sensitive and I was just being a baby. they thought that when I came home crying every day, I was an overly sensitive child and I should just learn to ignore them and they would go away, stop. My bullies never stopped, and the more I ignored them, the worse it got, until senior year when it really flourished and I couldn't go to school without being taunted, threatened, treated like I was a terrorist, actually called a terrorist, because apparently South Koreans were just North Korean spies. I appealed to school administrators, I appealed to my parents, I appealed to teachers that were standing right there when some of the incidents happened, and it was honestly amazing how much they could ignore. Finally, I came to my wits end, not knowing what else to do, I talked to their parents. In one case, he was actually a friend of my mom's, and he had been to Korea on an extended trip for studies and so on. So he was mortified. He apologized to my mom over and over again, and he also had terminal cancer. But after that, it stopped. I picked out my main bullies, because I didn't know what else to do, and I functioned under the assumption that they were jerks with parents that had taught them better, but didn't know.

I have to say, I hope the torturers of this boy have the same kinds of parents. My parents weren't inclined to step to my aid when I called. But when parents find out that their children are doing certain things, they react more efficiently sometimes and not so much other times. Some would blame the victim. In my case, it was so extreme I feared for my safety, and obviously so did this boy. My guess is that his parents made him dress well, pull up his pants, comb his hair, get good grades, work hard on any school teams he wanted to be on, be a good citizen. But evidently, kids in his school thought that put him in a seat below them, and they acted accordingly.

I hope that the parents of these kids don't try to apologize to his mother now, because that is something that would probably only hurt more. If I were her, I might be angry at them, even though they didn't do it, because they did not control their kids and teach their kids better. I would be extremely angry at administrators. I would be livid actually in a lot of ways. And frankly, parents apologizing isn't going to bring this boy who would've been 12 in just a few days back, it's not going to reverse what their kids did, it's not going to reverse the inaction or inappropriate actions of school administrators. But I hope the parents of these kids get involved, pay more attention to exactly what their kids are doing in and out of the home, and something changes in that school. It's a horrible way to make a difference, and a horrible thing to happen. But things have to change, at that school and at every school, at every workplace, etc.